GREAT3 -- Summer's Gone

 

It's been one of the more unusual Hump Days in recent memory. Along with the pandemic stuff, the entire world seems to be on tenterhooks about the aftermath of a certain election, but let's keep that out of the way since I want to keep things nice and copacetic here at "Kayo Kyoku Plus". Feel free to relax and bliss out.

Perhaps we can start things off with a group that I'm introducing onto the blog. Mind you, I've known about GREAT3 for a very long time...over a decade, to be exact, since this was one of the authors' recommended bands on "Japanese City Pop". In fact, whenever I leafed through the pages of my City Pop bible, I always saw GREAT3's debut 1995 album, "Richmondo High" pop up at the end. However I assumed that they had never shown up on YouTube since they were rather obscure.

Little did I know. Actually, there are quite a few songs up on the site by this band which, according to their Wikipedia article, was born after a previous band, Rotten Hats, broke up in 1994 with some of the members going on to form a new outfit Hicksville. Well, guitarist Akito Katayose（片寄明人）, drummer Kenichi Shirane（白根賢一）and bassist Kiyoshi Takakuwa（高桑圭）branched out to form GREAT3, and the name of the band wasn't created to arrogantly show off but to illustrate the fact that the three of them were (relatively) tall, ranging in height between 176 to 187 cm. All of them write their songs and also act as lead vocalist.

From their aforementioned "Richmondo High" album, here is "Summer's Gone". Despite my first sight of them in the pages of "Japanese City Pop", I don't quite think that this particular track is City Pop; it actually comes across as an appealing slice of straight-ahead pop with a hint of Shibuya-kei and somewhere in the middle, there's an even bigger sensation of 1960s sunshine pop. But in the J-Wiki article for them, they've been categorized as being fluent in rock, alternative rock, funk, pop/rock, psychedelic rock, indies pop, dream pop, folk rock and AOR. If I were thinking comparisons with other bands, I think that there's some similarity of GREAT3 with Original Love. 

As for "Richmondo High", it peaked at No. 66. GREAT3 had an initial run of 10 years between 1994 and 2004 with 14 singles and 7 albums under their belt. Then after nearly a decade apart, they came together again in 2012 with another single and a couple of albums. During their time together and away from each other, they were busy helping other artists individually such as daoko, Bonnie Pink and Chara in terms of writing and production and performing.

Bassist Takakuwa didn't return to GREAT3 when the band decided to get back together in 2012 but has since become the solo performer Curly Giraffe who has also joined up with guitarist Shigekazu Aida（曾田茂一）to form the duo HONESTY. Takakuwa's replacement was jan whose mother happens to be singer/photographer Nanako Sato（佐藤奈々子）. By the way, jan fits the requisite height for the band at 187 cm which just happens to be Takakuwa's height as well. Not sure if any of them bring a tape measure during auditions.

To finish off with even more family-based trivia, guitarist Katayose is married to model/singer Chocolat, and in 2000, they formed the duo Chocolat&Akito and released a single "Veranda".